Fashion’s revived love affair with Victoriana—all the puffed sleeves, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and yoked necklines that are advancing over the horizon—has made my mind stray again to memories of Laura Ashley: big in my school days. I spent an inordinate amount of teenage time as one of a bedraggled gang of four milkmaids who were our convent school renegades. After school, we’d moon around the new Laura Ashley store in our hometown, Bath, England, rifling through the stock of printed smocks and high-necked blouses—which we couldn’t afford. Then, it was off to jumble sales at weekends, to approximate the look. We’d fight over broderie anglaise Victorian white cotton nightdresses and camisoles—which you could then score for a few pence—and then go out and parade ourselves barefoot in parks and fields, dragging our skirts through the grass and drinking cider illicitly supplied by boyfriends. In retrospect, a pretty brilliant way to drive the nuns and our parents mad.

How funny it is to think that a second generation will be up to the same tricks this coming summer. The filter of fashion looks to me as if it’s set again at exactly the same Victoriana revival period that inspired us—the span of Laura Ashley’s early success, and the spate of romantic costume movies that ran through the ’70s and early ’80s. All Laura Ashley would need to do to capitalize on it would be to reissue any of the dresses we used to lust after—anything from the retrospective mounted at the Bath Fashion Museum in 2013 would be spot-on.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975, the Australian mystery tragedy that launched a thousand Victorian nighties.

Photo Courtesy of Picnic Productions

Otherwise, may I recommend vintage home viewing to ease us into the mood? It’s all there: Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975 (as quoted by Raf Simons in his swan song summer collection for Christian Dior); Nastassja Kinski in Roman Polanski’s Tess, 1979; Merchant Ivory Productions’s The Bostonians, 1984; and A Room With a View, 1985. The upshot, I guarantee, will fill many a girl with the urgent want of a white Victoriana blouse. Perfect thing for the holidays; perfect thing for getting ahead of next spring’s trend. Now, all I have to do is get up to the attic and find my ’80s hoard for my daughters . . .

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The Bostonians, 1984, a romance that went straight to the heart of fashion.